The air smelled of burnt oil and dust. For days, the skies over northern Saudi Arabia had been thick with the smoke from sabotured Kuwaiti wells, a greasy pall that turned the sun into a dull copper coin. On the night of January 29, under that unnatural haze, Iraqi mechanized units crossed the border.
Their objective was Khafji, a modest Saudi oil town. But the streets they rumbled into were already silent. Coalition air patrols had spotted the advance. Saudi and Qatari forces had pulled back to the outskirts. What remained was a ghost town of low concrete buildings, the windows dark, the only movement the swirl of grit against curbs. The battle, the first major ground clash of the Gulf War, was not a fight for the town itself. It was a fight in its empty grid.
For the next 48 hours, the soundscape was defined by the crump of artillery, the stutter of machine guns from Saudi V-150 armored vehicles, and the distant, shuddering roar of A-10 Warthogs strafing Iraqi columns. The engagement was a confused, brutal affair in the murk. Marines, like Corporal Troy Dunlap from a reconnaissance team trapped behind Iraqi lines, huddled in buildings, listening to the scrape of tank treads on asphalt just outside. The victory, when it came, was measured in charred vehicles and prisoners. But the first impression, the lasting one, was of a battle fought in a void, a violent argument in a place everyone had already left.